Picking your monster
In my opinion, in the past few years, media and media pundits have slowly encouraged us listeners to no longer dis-agree with a person due to their views but to now encounter and approach them as if they were monsters.
They are no longer people with whom we can simply dis-agree.
We are urged to de-value them as humans. We are encourage by any means necessary to give them a third eye located in the middle of their foreheads or having long, protruding shiny horns or as some giant amorphous figure dripping with green slime.
In other words, anyone we envision as being different than ourselves is therefore worthy of the most vile and contemptible treatment our imagination can conjure up. And if our vivid imaginations advance from verbal emasculation to the pronouncement of complete physical annihilation, so be it.
Throughout the most recent years, techniques for creating monsters have become a carefully crafted and nurtured art form. We can pick any person or group of people and apply the formula and have instant monsterhood. We can do it with Mormons, Muslins, homosexuals, Blacks, Republicans, Democrats and Civil Rights Workers. The list is endless.
As to issues of politics, television is the prime creator of Republican monsters wherein AM Radio limits itself to creating Democratic monsters.
Since AM Radio is lacking the important component of the visual, it picks pundits gifted with abilities to create theaters in the mind. They hire pundits who can stage issues as vivid and emotionally charged as if we were sitting in the front row of a theater on Broadway.
And finally, I am mindful how in the late 1970s FBI director Herbert Hoover told the media to never publish anything positive regarding the Black Panthers. He told them to always publish activities of the Black Panthers in a negative light. The media did dutifully comply and the results were diabolical.
And now today, on the contemporary scene and so many years later, the media has thrown into the formula outright lies and highly imaginative distortions. Media feels all is fair game in creating a monster. Civility be damned; it’s so yesterday!
As always,
BB
They are no longer people with whom we can simply dis-agree.
We are urged to de-value them as humans. We are encourage by any means necessary to give them a third eye located in the middle of their foreheads or having long, protruding shiny horns or as some giant amorphous figure dripping with green slime.
In other words, anyone we envision as being different than ourselves is therefore worthy of the most vile and contemptible treatment our imagination can conjure up. And if our vivid imaginations advance from verbal emasculation to the pronouncement of complete physical annihilation, so be it.
Throughout the most recent years, techniques for creating monsters have become a carefully crafted and nurtured art form. We can pick any person or group of people and apply the formula and have instant monsterhood. We can do it with Mormons, Muslins, homosexuals, Blacks, Republicans, Democrats and Civil Rights Workers. The list is endless.
As to issues of politics, television is the prime creator of Republican monsters wherein AM Radio limits itself to creating Democratic monsters.
Since AM Radio is lacking the important component of the visual, it picks pundits gifted with abilities to create theaters in the mind. They hire pundits who can stage issues as vivid and emotionally charged as if we were sitting in the front row of a theater on Broadway.
And finally, I am mindful how in the late 1970s FBI director Herbert Hoover told the media to never publish anything positive regarding the Black Panthers. He told them to always publish activities of the Black Panthers in a negative light. The media did dutifully comply and the results were diabolical.
And now today, on the contemporary scene and so many years later, the media has thrown into the formula outright lies and highly imaginative distortions. Media feels all is fair game in creating a monster. Civility be damned; it’s so yesterday!
As always,
BB
posted by BB at 1:14 AM
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